Title: Dear Hope, Was Anything Lost Or Gained?

This work investigates representational images and architectural entertainments of present-day Williamsburg/Brooklyn. Enframed by a set of new constraints forged in contemporary times, architectural fragments from the past appear now denigrated by nostalgic sentiments.

Revisiting "our" former neighbourhood, seeing slick-looking construction-sites, contemporary archictecture reassembling/quoting Brooklin-style houses, which were never there before, listening to the private voices selling fictional styles of life and imaginary behaviors made us land on the thought that right here before us another postmodern ambiguity depoliticizes and neutralizes our critical awareness of contemporary city life.

All that is happening there currently is what we have dealt with in our work (and privatley) in the last seven or eight years. When we conceived our first work "Dencity" which was all about Williamsburg and its periphery and the wave of gentrification rolling in at that time, at least visually, the surface of the place, seemed intact. The title was fusing the words density and city and called out to ourselves the task at hand: to look, listen to, recover, (re)present, and in some sense stay vigilant to the dense, vertiginous city: the city which is ever changing, ever elusive, reappearing and disappearing in a kind of dance between competing forces. As much as we were concerned with the discourses enveloping it, we felt the need to confront those discursive sites with the physical and material developments, locations, and manifestations. The terms spanned psychological, economic, and social motivations and effects, including the words power, pollution, corruption, gentrification, speculation, greed, desire, hope, property, nostalgia and silence.

However, it is only now, that a story can be told more clearly through images of new buildings and the disappearance of places we once haunted.

Yes, something gained means also to have something lost!